The truth about college & careers

[media-credit name=”Denver Post file photo” align=”aligncenter” width=”495″][/media-credit] The campus at the University of Colorado at Boulder

I’m standing in the lobby of my kids’ high school, waiting for my twins to join me after their last-ever high school musical. My son had played trombone in the pit while my daughter sang onstage with the cast. How did I feel? Happy, sad, wistful, proud – exactly the way any parent would feel. In the lobby hung a wonderful photo portrait of the 500-member graduating class, and as I waited I scanned the photo, looking at familiar faces. Aah, I remember that little girl from Brownies, I thought, and that little boy from soccer, years ago. Another parent stood next to me, and he asked me “Is one of these seniors yours?”

“Yes,” I said, “this boy up here, and this girl.” “What are they planning to study in college?” asked the man. “They’re both going to study music,” I said. “Oh great,” said the man, as he turned and walked away. “More starving artists.”

I was too stunned to speak. I turned and looked at him as he strode across the lobby. Part of me wanted to run after him and shake him, and part of me wanted to wing my purse at the back of his neck. I rifled through my mental database. Had I seen that dad before? Oh yes, I had, I recalled. We sat on a committee together, umpteen years ago. That guy is a CPA in town. God bless him, I thought. God bless him and all the people who think that going to college means preparing yourself for a job, and nothing more. God bless those people, because they are deserving of our pity, if they have no more vision for a kid’s future (or their own) than “Get a practical degree, and get a stable job.”

College is not trade school. Trade school itself is not trade school, in the sense that you go in one end of a chute and come out the other end job-ready. Every kind of educational experience is more than that, or can be.

College, and every kind of educational experience, is grow-your-flame school, first. A kid learns something he or she is excited about, and the kid’s flame grows. I didn’t sit through hours of shoot-me-now music theory classes so that I could do music theory all day at a desk. I’m not sure jobs like that even exist. I did it because learning how the pieces fit together, how harmony and rhythm and chord structures work, enlarged my brain and elevated my perspective. Aah, I remember thinking, ten thousand years ago in music school. So that’s how that works. So that’s why Alban Berg used that chord in his opera “Wozzeck.” So that’s how it fits together.

If our highest aspiration were to teach kids how to do jobs, we wouldn’t need most college programs. You can learn almost anything on the job. That’s what apprenticeships used to do, for hundreds of years. Millers and blacksmiths and bricklayers didn’t stand around and complain that the kids in their shops weren’t qualified, because the point of the apprenticeship was to teach the kid how to do the work. Apprenticeships work wonderfully. How did we manage for hundreds of years without college? We taught kids how to problem-solve on the ground.

I’m a corporate HR leader. That’s my background. I have 100% confidence that if you give me a bright kid who’s interested in people, I can make the kid a capable HR person. It’s not just me – any HR mentor can do it. The academic part of HR is strictly beside the point, because learning the how-tos of compensation and benefits and training is better done in context than in the abstract, not just for HR people but for anyone.

I ran HR for a huge company, and I never took a class in HR. How did I do it? You work on little problems first, then bigger and bigger ones, and as you see larger problems and solve them, you see how the pieces fit together.

That’s always been the case, but we’ve taught people to believe they need degrees in order to do simple jobs that any reasonable person could learn. We’ve created a monolith of certifications and credit hours and ultra-specialized fields of study, and made people afraid to try to do anything important (or well-paying) without those trophies and trappings. That’s shameful. It’s shameful how we’ve degraded college and all forms of advanced education to x + y = z transactions, a la “Get this degree and you’re sure to get a job!”

Let’s tell the truth about college, kids and careers:

College is a place to go to learn how to be an adult, to discover where your flame lies and to grow that flame.

Kids with college degrees aren’t more qualified than kids without them. Everyone could go to college and have the growing-up experiences college provides if we hadn’t made college an elite, expensive thing. That’s another national shame.

The more entrepreneurial and flame-y the kid, the less the kid needs college. That’s why my kids (and perhaps yours, too) were deluged with offers of scholarships from colleges who need flame-y kids more than they even need money.

The system is breaking down, and it’s high time, because for years we’ve believed that a certain degree from a certain school conferred on our kid a magical shield of protection against unemployment, want and self-doubt. It’s shameful that we would tell a kid they needed a brand name to make them whole and perfect. Our kids are whole and perfect without a degree.

Colleges themselves contributed to the “your kid needs this trophy” fervor. I was shocked beyond speech when I saw a recruitment ad from the esteemed university Miami of Ohio, highlighting this cynical trend. The ad said “Miami of Ohio grads get the jobs with higher salaries.” That’s disgusting. You’ve trained a kid to know himself and feel good about himself, only to choose a college because that way? Is that what we’re raising our kids to be — kids who go for the higher salary, who assume that their adult lives are already prescribed and ordained and that a job with a higher salary than others is the brass ring?

We can do better. We must. It’s time to reinvent college and the path to careers, reminding kids and their parents that learning is powerful in its own right, regardless of what kind of job lies at the other end of the chute. Kids with mojo don’t worry about what kind of job they’ll get after college. They know they’ll be okay, because they know who they are and that is enough.

Learning to learn is a joy and a tonic for confused and weary kids. Believing that only good grades at a good school will make a kid appealing to an employer is a national sickness, and it’s not only parents and their kids who have the malady. Colleges have it, from admissions people to deans and beyond. Employers have it. It’s a shameful conspiracy of need and privilege, and it causes harm to children and their families every day.

Why do children weep over college rejection letters? Why would we teach our children that they are less worthy if they don’t get into one school, versus another? Why would their parents bolster that belief by paying admissions counselors to help their kids wriggle through ever-tighter keyholes? How could success possibly be defined so cynically and narrowly, such that a whole industry has sprung up to reinforce those tired and empty beliefs?

Children go through massive emotional changes in high school. Parents watch kids go through trauma and heartache all the time. Those experiences teach our kids powerful lessons, and we learn from the experiences too. What parent would tell a kid “Hang out with the popular kids, because that will be good for your own popularity.”? We’d be horrified to think we’d sacrifice our child’s own self-worth for a stupid trophy like an invitation to a cool kid’s birthday party.

Why would our thinking be any different when the subject is college? Yet parents tell me every year, “I’m praying my son gets into a top school, because that will really help him on the job hunt later.” Really, Mom and Dad? Is that your aspiration for your child — that some unnamed employer will find your child worthy, down the line? What message does that send to a child?

My middle son is a kid on his own track. He left his bricks-and-mortar high school a month ago to study at a virtual high school called Boulder Universal. He’s already done with the semester’s work. “I want to work full time,” he says, “and make money, and also that way I can play more music during the day.” I don’t worry about that kid. I worry about kids who believe that external approval is the key to a happy life, and that a certain diploma is a big part of a person’s value. I worry about kids who believe that college is merely preparation for a salaried career. I worry about kids like the one in an undergraduate business program who told me, “People who get HR degrees are stupid. If you can handle business school, why not get a Finance degree and make the real money?”

What are we teaching our kids? When we talk about struggling communities and fraying social bonds, can we also look in the mirror?

I like reading your articles, there is a practical, real-world voice to them. A college degree is like anything else – you get what you put into it. In order to be successful in whatever you do – sciences, finance, music, etc, you need three things:

1. Knowledge, whether you get it from an apprenticeship, college, or the school of life.

2. Passion for what you are doing.

3. Hard work.

A college degree is not a magic wand to success and a good paying job. You have to find the right venue to learn your craft. I chose a college known for its school of engineering, and hands-on approach and struggled through most of my classes. But I loved what I was doing, and during my last two summers, I got jobs in the field where I learned what it was like to work in the real world. I made the most of my internship experiences, putting in extra hours, asking all sorts of questions, and asking to do extra work.

This helped me clarify how I wanted to use the knowledge I was learning in my classes. My second internship gave me more confidence in what I was doing. And you’re right, the 4 year process helped me grow into an adult ready to tackle my first job.

As you said, you start with small things and work your way towards being able to do bigger things. And if you work hard and show dedication to doing quality work, that pays off in so many ways.

It’s what you do with what you’ve learned, how open you are to other opportunities that may not look like much at the start, and seeing how far your passion for doing what you love can take you. It can reward you in ways you’d never dreamed of.

Some may argue that I got an engineering degree, so of course, duh. But I know of others who have a similar degree, but they don’t like what they do, they aren’t open to new ideas, and they put in long hours feeling like a work drone.

The key to success – being passionate about doing what you love and open to new opportunities which is the recipe to happiness in my book.

Susan

Vic Nardozza

This article comes of as a long-winded justification as to why her middle kid dropped out of high school.

Davida

I used to make the same comments when I was a student tour guide at Indiana University in the late 1980’s, and I still agree now. Our Office of Admissions discouraged us from attempting to appeal based on rankings, strongly feeling that potential students should feel the connection and potential. College is a place to learn to learn, to communicate, and to grow.

(I still remember a tour participant’s father telling me that Miami of Ohio’s business school was ranked better than Harvard’s. I cringed as I told him Miami’s was an undergraduate program, and Harvard’s was a graduate program.)

Liz Ryan is a former Fortune 500 HR executive and the CEO of Human Workplace, an online community and consulting firm focused on reinventing work and career education. She is working with the Denver Post to bring the best expert advice on work place issues and tips to improve your career. Note: Liz Ryan was selected for her expertise, but her opinions are solely her own. We are not endorsing or advocating her business.